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Archive for 2011

On December 16, 2011, Soyuz launched the Pléiades 1a satellite from the Guiana Space Centre (CSG), a new version of the satellite that flew in October. The Pléiades 1a was built by Astrium for the French space agency CNES.

In partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project, Autodesk has developed an interactive map displaying the cities around world that are trying to fight climate change as participants in the CDP Cities program.

This interactive map displays the cities around world that are trying to fight climate change as participants in the CDP Cities program.

At Autodesk University 2011, GISCafe’s Sanjay Gangal interviewed Kevin Reilly, president of Pictometry Business Solutions, Pictometry, about the company’s focus and what new products they were introducing at the event.

Sanjay: How long has Pictometry been around?

Kevin: Pictometry has been around for a little over ten years. It is a disruptive technology company. We have a dataset that’s unique, we fly aerial imagery, we collect oblique images as well as ortho images, which is a rich dataset, and then we have an analytics platform that allows you to mine information from the imagery. What’s unique is every pixel has three dimensional elements to it, so you can measure anything you see on the image from height, distance, measurement, area. Every pixel has a lat long, so you can also measure elevation, and we can also bring GIS layers onto the imagery so you can displayed things like hazard layers, parcels, any other GIS layers can be displayed on the Pictometry platform.

An important geospatial data event that commenced yesterday in Abu Dhabi is the Eye on Earth Abu Dhabi 2011 Summit and Exhibition, a joint initiative of the Government of Abu Dhabi and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), opened today at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. The Summit has convened leaders from the worldwide geospatial data movement to outline a roadmap for the better integration of the world’s flood of environmental and societal data for the benefit of all, and especially of developing economies.

The patron for this event is His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates. The Eye on Earth Abu Dhabi 2011 Summit & Exhibition is hosted by Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD), facilitated by Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI) and held in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

At its opening Monday 12 December, H. E. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, the Secretary-General of Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, said: “The reason we are all here today (is) safeguarding our environment for our future generations…This Summit is held in recognition that environmental and societal data should be collected in a concerted manner, at its source, made accessible and affordable and should be used to underpin reporting and support decision making in order to achieve sustainable development.”

The Eye on Earth Summit attracts those in global leadership of the environmental information movement, a group dedicated to maximizing and exposing the benefits of geospatial information to decision-makers worldwide.

James Staten of Forrester Research spoke about the cloud at the recent Autodesk University in Las Vegas. He made a case for the cloud by saying that “clouds are more secure than you are.”

His recommendations:

Focus – clouds can concentrate their whole security team on securing the one app.

Exposure – when cloud outages happens every customer gets upset and they end up in New York Times. When your email system goes down it doesn’t show up in the papers. Because of that risk those creating the cloud invest heavily in the best security minds out there. Every one of those was given a job offer by Amazon, Microsoft, etc. at very high salaries. “If anyone breaks into my account I want to know about it. The cloud is concerned with extreme audits, a security expert, who they hire, who gets into the data center, whether they are making sure malware is up to date,” said Staten.

Validation

Multitenancy – there is far more encryption in the cloud model and it is far more difficult to see that another customer is there to alleviate concerns of privacy such as Pepsi and Coke using the same cloud service, for example.

Recently TomTom introduced the WEBFLEET Mobile Smartphone App, which gives an overarching view of a customer’s fleet to the PC in the office. This can be accessed on any device from anywhere drawing data from the cloud and is particularly useful to small business owners. In an interview with Michael Geffroy, Vice President of Sales, North America for TomTom Business Solutions, he outlined the exciting features of WEBFLEET:

Director of Professional Services at IMAGinIT Kevin Breslin said at Autodesk University 2011 this week that they are seeing an uptake of Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler in their work as consultants.

Customers are using it a lot in civil engineering for conceptual design. They can put in roads, move and change things around and tap into their geospatial data and combine that with data in Autodesk Map and Civil 3D. Breslin said the visualization/analysis tool can handle large amounts of data.

In an interview with Scott Robinson, Director, Global Data Products at Pitney Bowes Business Insight, he talked about the company’s new Geosk search engine, which uses the location of the data itself to help reduce the sheer volume of the results and to rank the search results specifically to the needs of the user.

GISVoice: How does the data search work? What types of keywords and results do users get?

Scott Robinson: Search, discovery, and access of spatial content are the main objectives of Geosk. Keyword searches performed by customers in the Geosk Marketplace match up against the descriptions and metadata and records of the available listings. Users can search by keywords, like a content type (i.e. Streets), geography (i.e. San Francisco, a specific postcode), or other search facets including file format, data type, projection, data vendor, and customer rating. MapRank™ search technology is used to enhance and refine the search, ensuring that the most geographically relevant results are returned.
GISVoice: What specific advantages are there to this type of data search as opposed to a browser or other applications?

There are 2 specific advantages to this type of data search (which are part of platform services provided by WeoGeo).

The first is in the search technology itself. Text-based search dominates the search world today and search results from a text-based query can be overwhelming for the user to review. That is why there is so much emphasis by search companies on “tuning” their algorithms to the interests of the user. The spatial data industry has an additional filter that can be used to fine-tune search results, which is the geographical location of the data set of interest. We use the location of the data itself to help reduce the sheer volume of the results and to rank the results specifically to the needs of the user.

The second advantage comes from the accessibility of the data once the search is completed. If you find it on Geosk, you can have the data right now and in many cases, you can have as little or as much of it as you want.

GISVoice: How does the cloud draw from the disparate databases that information is stored in?

The information is actually stored in the cloud and has been indexed to optimize search efficiency. The information can be stored natively in one of many spatial data file formats, like MapInfo TAB, ESRI Shape, KML, CSV and many others. Once the user identifies the data they want, they can perform on demand transformations to the many file format types supported by the platform.

GISVoice: Does the data search for data such as that used by Homeland Security or other government agencies, and how does that work if so?

The data search is a function of what is accessible to the user using the platform. Publically available data sets that are hosted by Geosk are available to any user. Those data that are available on an access-controlled basis (where the access is controlled by the owner of the data) are only available to credentialed Users.

GISVoice: What is the pricing structure for this solution?

Geosk Marketplace offers data in 2 different ways. First, you can “buy by the drink” which is where you find, customize, and purchase data for immediate consumption. Second, you can buy an annual subscription to the data where you can get continuous access and customization services, as well as our maintenance of the data.

Geosk Library is a hosted solution for managing an organization’s spatial data assets. This offering is a monthly fee for hosting and management of content that is based on size of the data stored, and the number of users accessing the content. The purchasers of Geosk Library have the added capability to sell their data, just like PBBI does on Geosk.

GISVoice: Is the data resident in PBBIs own catalog of data sets more easily accessible than that data that comes from disparate databases?

Geosk offers the customer the ability to purchase data through PBBI’s online catalog, or also to use the Geosk platform to manage internal data stored in disparate databases. Using the Geosk platform dramatically enhances the search and accessibility of spatial content, whether the content is internally or externally licensed.

GISVoice: What advice can you give people who might be new to PBBI’s data resources and to this service?

Our customers tend to use consumer on-demand services every day, services like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and many others. We’re trying to help the spatial industry become more productive by providing many of the same features and functionality available on these platforms to the analysts in our community. As users of mapping and GIS software, my advice would be to consider being more productive by using Geosk to find, acquire and manage their spatial content, so that they can create better analysis and more efficiently complete their goals.

According to a press release issued by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) November 18, the Landsat 5 Mission may no longer remain in operation. The reason for this is the USGS has stopped acquiring images from the 27-year-old Landsat 5 Earth observation satellite due to a rapidly degrading electronic component.

A Landsat 5 image of the Wallow Fire acquired on June 15, 2011. Landsat imagery courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and U.S. Geological Survey

A Landsat 5 image of the Wallow Fire acquired on June 15, 2011. Landsat imagery courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and U.S. Geological Survey

When Landsat 5 was launched in 1984 it was designed to last 3 years. The USGS assumed operation of Landsat 5 in 2001 and managed to rescue the aging satellite back from the brink of total failure on several occasions following the malfunction of key subsystems.

“This anticipated decline of Landsat 5 provides confirmation of the importance of the timely launch of the next Landsat mission and the need for an operational and reliable National Land Imaging System,” stated Anne Castle, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. “The USGS is committed to maintaining the unique long term imaging database that the Landsat program provides.”

The amplifier that is in jeopardy is essential for transmitting land-surface images from the Landsat 5 satellite to ground receiving stations in the U.S. and around the world. In the past 10 days, amplifier problems have significantly diminished the satellite’s ability to down load images.

Now USGS engineers have suspended imaging activities for 90 days so that they can explore possible options for restoring satellite-to-ground image transmissions.

The USGS-operated Landsat 7 is actively in orbit collecting global imagery. Launched in 1999 with a 5-year design life, Landsat 7 has experienced an instrument anomaly which reduces the amount of data collected per image. A new satellite, Landsat 8, currently named the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, is now scheduled to be launched in January 2013.